Deputy draws workers together via smartphone

With gadgets blurring the boundaries between personal and working lives, a Sydney-based start-up looks well placed to capitalise on the trend and is already gaining the attention of Silicon Valley.

Deputy.com makes people management software that helps hotel chains, construction firms and other organisations with a decentralised workforce communicate more effectively with staff. It has only 80 customers and 4000 users, but hopes the popularity of smartphones and tablets will see its software in the pockets of workers across the country and eventually all over the world.

Scaling up to meet future demand will not be a problem because the business is built entirely on the cloud infrastructure of Amazon Web Services.

Deputy.com chief executive Nathan Brumby says it is tackling a long-standing problem that people have in trying to run a decentralised workforce – staff feel disconnected and often don’t know what’s going on.

“I think there is a massive technology shift in the ability to be connected," he says. “Companies need to embrace smart devices and social media to make them compelling for the work environment.

“I’m a creature of habit and check my email in the morning, my calendar and news feeds to see what is going on in the world. Whether you’re in the building industry, hospitality or aged care, access to your work world should be a button on your phone."

There’s no doubt that the next generation of workers will expect better access to information in their daily working life. Brumby envisages a world where a teenager starting her first job has the staff roster sent to her phone, complete with photos of crew members so she knows who they are.

When she gets on-site, a list of tasks for the day will turn up in her in box, the device will generate an automatic timesheet when she leaves and performance reviews will be a continuous process rather than an annual event. If a colleague is celebrating a birthday, or won’t be in today because he’s ill, she will expect to be notified.

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“As an employer all of this ties into culture and productivity, the ability to retain staff and ensuring your brand is well represented," Brumby says.

Deputy.com was set up in November 2008, and chief technology officer Ashik Ahmed has had a simple mantra since day one: “If it ain’t cloud, it ain’t allowed."

This early commitment to the cloud model had an immediate cost benefit because the company did not have to invest capital in technology equipment to run the business or employ an infrastructure manager to make sure it keeps working.

More importantly, it only pays for the technology resources it uses and has rapid access to extra capacity. Deputy.com does an average of 56,000 computes per second but demands on its technology infrastructure can be 10 times higher than that when a large number of customers do their payroll on the same afternoon. Demand for its services can also be seasonal because it has retail and hospitality customers.

“With the cloud you fundamentally have a different business model focused on how quickly you can build a product and get it to market," Brumby says. “It’s almost the exact opposite of what traditional enterprise software is all about It’s flipped everything upside down."

The nightmare scenario for a business built in the cloud is that its services essentially don’t exist if an outage takes them offline. Brumby acknowledges the risk, but points out that a multinational like Amazon is better placed to manage it than his staff could ever be.

“Things like power loss or floods can happen when you have your own infrastructure," he says. “There’s always something that could go wrong, but that’s life and you have to manage your risk."

The other possible downside is that customers are nervous about using Deputy.com’s services because it will store their sensitive information in data centres located overseas. Brumby plays down those concerns and insists they haven’t cost the company a single deal.

“The location of data centres is becoming less of an issue every day," he says. “There are some areas [such as government, financial services and other regulated industries] where it is still sensitive, but we are not in those industries."

Brumby says for the first three years of its existence Deputy.com was in “stealth mode" – but still managed to build a base of 70 customers and 3000 users without marketing.

Late last year it was entered into the Amazon start-up challenge and its management was flown to the US to meet Amazon executives and Silicon Valley private equity firms including Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins. Accel has a history of investing in Aussie start-ups including Atlassian and 99designs.

Brumby, who joined Deputy.com only in January, has just hired a chief marketing officer and more developers.

He says the firm is talking to major restaurant chains and a national parking business as it steps up attempts to commercialise the technology.

It has yet to expand beyond Australia but he expects that to happen soon as franchises take off in Asia or New Zealand.

“We would love to see the Deputy icon on lots of devices, and every 18-year-old with a part-time job in Australia using it," he says. “Beyond that we believe we have something compelling enough to go outside Australia because it’s disruptive and I’m yet to sit with someone and not have them get it.

“We’ve just got to be smart, execute well and go step-by-step to see where we end up. I’ve been around long enough to know that you mustn’t get carried away, but if you do the right things they sort of look after themselves," he says.